The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 6th May’20

Table of Contents

It’s time for a virtual judiciary

Covid-19 showed us that many activities can simply be done online.
We all have apps on our phones.
Time has come: ‘work from home’
The pendency of cases in various courts in India is staggering.
The Economic Survey of 2019-2020 dedicates a chapter to pendency of tax cases and revenue cases.
On the contrary, the existing infrastructure is grossly under-utilised.
Income Tax Tribunal that function only half-day most of the time.
Most courts are closed for Christmas and summer vacations.
Judges are not accountable for efficiency and performance.
Thousands of Indians cannot afford to go to court as legal costs are high and legal procedures are complicated.
The bane of the court system is that lawyers on both sides need to be physically present in court.
Cases are often adjourned due to various reasons.
Submit all the papers via mail.
The judge can decide the case based on all the available information.
Not only will a virtual judiciary result in substantial savings in costs but will also lead to speedy disposal of cases.
The fact that the jurisdiction of a court is defined by geography makes no sense in matters such as taxation and company law.
All judges should be empowered to handle any case, wherever it originates.
This will result in multiple advantages — the principal one being better utilisation of manpower and infrastructure by equitably distributing the work.
Also, malpractices will be limited as there will no longer be familiarity between lawyers and judges in a city.
We need a change in mindset regarding the way we work.
Imagine the overall savings and extent of improvement of the judicial ecosystem if 70% of the cases get decided without going to court?

Dangerous drift

We are going to have a difficult summer ahead.
We lost four soldiers and a police officer in an encounter with terrorists near Handwara.
It is unusual and disproportionate for just a couple of terrorists to take down five highly skilled and motivated soldiers — a Commanding Officer of a battalion in the rank of a colonel, a major, two other ranks and a special operations group policeman in the rank of a sub inspector — in a firefight.
The details on offer are sketchy, yet provide compelling evidence of an operation that went horribly wrong.
On Saturday afternoon, receiving intelligence that terrorists were present in a house in Changimulla village, Colonel Ashutosh Sharma of 21 Rashtriya Rifles, Major Anuj Sood, Naik Rajesh Kumar, Lance Naik Dinesh Singh and J&K Police Sub Inspector Shakeel Qazi, and possibly others reached the site which had a building and a cowshed adjoining it, and an intense firefight commenced.
All the enemy fire came from the cowshed, not the building.
Then there was a lull for more than an hour during which the team apparently decided to approach the house and use the vantage of the upper floor to fire at the terrorists in the cowshed.
They entered the house and there was a fresh firefight but no communication from the Colonel and his team.
Then it was noticed that their communication instrument was being used by the terrorists.
That is when realisation came all was not well, and firing ensued all over again.
This time when it was over, there were seven bodies.
Since the beginning of the year, in 127 days, as many as 55 terrorists have been killed in the region, roughly one encounter every two days
As the dangerous drift in J&K continues, New Delhi must realise it has reached the point of diminishing returns and should look for ways to arrest this trend.

The mark of zero

Kerala appears to have finally hammered the curve flat.
On May 1, for the first time, the State reported zero new cases, and again on two consecutive days — May 3 and May 4.
If in April there were early signs of Kerala gaining an upper hand over the virus, its control became clear from the fourth week of April.
The small number of cases reported so far — 499 — demonstrates how excellent its containment efforts have been.
What is more remarkable is that 462 of those infected have fully recovered, including an elderly couple, aged 93 and 88 years, and there have been just three deaths — a case fatality rate of 0.6% against the national average of 3.3%.
The containment success can be traced back to how Kerala did not wait for directions from the Centre but instead led from the front.
When the number of cases increased to 12 on March 10, a day before WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Kerala shut down all educational institutions and entertainment centres, banned large gatherings and appealed to people to avoid visiting religious places.
Kerala has very good health-care infrastructure in place, down to the primary health-care centres.
Entire health-care infrastructure working in tandem despite being decentralised.
Political leadership, and the close and complete involvement of the government at all levels with the bureaucracy and local community have been a huge advantage.
The very different health-seeking behaviour and high literacy too have played a pivotal role in the war against the virus.
It is a success born out of decades-old social revolution and development.
This is also the reason why other States, even if they emulate the measures adopted by Kerala to fight the virus, may not be able to achieve the same level of success.

The case for a gradual exit

The impetus for the shutdown was driven in large part by a document from the Imperial College, London, which modelled options to handle the pandemic in high-income countries, specifically the U.K. and the U.S., which it called mitigation and suppression.
Mitigation refers to methods to reduce the numbers infected and protect the most vulnerable.
Measures advised are home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and physical distancing of those at most risk of severe disease.
The measures described under suppression are more or less what have come to be called lockdowns but do not include complete shutdown of work.
The aim of suppression is to prevent the infection from spreading to others.
The authors said, in order to be effective, lockdowns needed to be in place for 12 to 18 months which is the time estimated for an effective vaccine to be available.
The International Labour Organization reports that nearly 50% of the world’s labour force is in immediate danger of losing their livelihood.
The Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, says women are especially suffering the deadly impact of lockdowns.
At a conservative estimate, for over 50% of the world’s population, a two-year lockdown would mean the end of their world.
Proponents of the concept of herd immunity have been criticised for being irresponsible.
For SARS-CoV-2, estimates are that 60%-70% of the population needs to have antibodies for the herd effect to occur.
Their argument ignores 4 factors

The number of deaths can be brought below 1% if we protect the most vulnerable, which is easier than locking down the entire population.
As statistics show, lockdowns also result in a very large number of deaths.
The pandemic will end much sooner than two years if herd immunity occurs.
We do not know the actual number infected up to now, as no country has reliable data.

Therefore, a gradual exit, using mitigation measures, will save the greatest number of lives.
Critics also state that it is not certain if infection with this virus leads to immunity.
The best evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is able to induce protective antibody production in humans comes from the observation that most people get rid of the virus without the help of any medicines.
An effective complete lockdown requires physical distancing at a level not possible in India without tremendous resources from the government.
Mitigation measures, taking the people into confidence, and facing the pandemic by deploying available resources in the best possible way is the most ethical and effective response.

Pathways to a more resilient economy

Economists cannot predict in what form the economy will emerge from it.
Machines do not have the capacity for emergence. Once built, their capabilities inevitably reduce with increasing entropy.
On the other hand, living systems evolve and acquire new capabilities over time.
Only humans consciously develop new concepts, new scientific ideas, and new language in their search for new visions.
Institutions of governance are human inventions for directing human endeavours and for providing stability.
7 radical ideas emerging as pathways to build a more resilient economy and a more just society.
“De-Growth”: The obsession with GDP as the supreme goal of progress has been challenged often.
Nobel laureates in economics (Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and others) are calling upon their profession to rethink the fundamentals of economics, especially the purpose of GDP.
Boundary-lessness is a mantra for hyper-globalisers.
Boundaries, they say, impede flows of trade, finance, and people.
According to systems’ theory, sub-systems within complex systems must have boundaries around them, albeit appropriately permeable ones, so that the sub-systems can maintain their own integrity and evolve.
Government is good.
Even capitalist corporations who wanted governments out of the way to make it easy for them to do business are lining up for government bailouts.
The “market” is not the best solution.
Money is a convenient currency for managing markets and for conducting transactions.
Whenever goods and services are left to markets, the dice is loaded against those who do not have money to obtain what they need.
The “marketization” of economies has contributed to the increasing inequalities in wealth over the last 50 years, which Thomas Piketty and others have documented.
“Citizen” welfare, not “consumer” welfare, must be the objective of progress.
Citizens have a broader set of needs than consumers.
They value justice, dignity, and societal harmony too.
Competition must be restrained
From school onwards, children are taught to compete.
Companies must improve their competitive abilities.
Intellectual property belongs to the public.
It is imperative to evolve new institutions for public ownership of technologies and for the regulation of their use.
The paradigm shift necessary after the crisis will not be easy.
There will be resistance to shifts in social, economic, and political power towards those who have less from those who have more within the present paradigm.
The economic system cannot be redesigned by domain experts devising solutions within their silos.
Trade experts recommending new trade policies, intellectual property experts recommending reforms of intellectual property rights, and industry experts recommending industry policies.
All the pieces must fit together.
Innovations are required at many levels to create a more resilient and just world.
Getting over pandemic stage fright
At the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, many doctors, nurses and other staff became infected with SARS-CoV-2 and had to be quarantined, depleting a range of health-care professionals.
On April 8, a government hospital in Jahangirpuri, Delhi, was closed after 14 doctors and nurses were found positive for the novel coronavirus infection.
Recent reports indicate that one in 15 SARS- CoV-2 infected individuals in the national capital is a healthcare worker.

What about individual medical practitioners?

In all these situations, a correct understanding of the nature of the epidemic and acknowledging community transmission would have alerted the medical profession and avoided a loss of lives.

What is community transmission?

If A was infected by a known contact B, in epidemiology we say B infected A.
When contact is unknown we say ‘someone in the community’ infected A; hence the term “community transmission”.
Community transmission had started in India by, or before, midMarch 2020.
As the epidemic advances, community transmission is natural and inevitable.
The lives of many health-care professionals need not and should not have been lost on account of semantic misinterpretation of epidemiology.
Admitting community transmission does not lower the honour of mother India in the eyes of foreigners; on the contrary it boosts the sagging morale of health-care professionals, prevents avoidable loss of manpower in the face of the epidemic, and preserves the integrity of the entire health-care system.
Protecting the lives of health-care professionals by acknowledging community transmission and strict implementation of appropriate personal protective equipment will ensure that there is no attrition of the pool of health-care professionals needed to deal with the epidemic.

NEWS

India records another spike with 3,875 new cases, 194 deaths
AI to charge commercial fares from stranded Indians
Minister cites financial difficulties of airlines amid lockdown
India needs a big stimulus package: Abhijit Banerjee
TRF a Pak. ploy to avoid scrutiny, says J&K’s DGP
Security forces say there is nothing alarming about The Resistance Front (TRF) as all attacks carried out by the Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) are being pinned on the newly formed “seasonal” group in the Kashmir Valley in order to escape international scrutiny.
Centre steps in after Gujarat records 49 virus deaths in a day
24 patients at Army hospital test positive
Haryana government decides to levy ‘COVID cess’ on liquor
Return of migrant workers increases fears of contagion

‘Darbar Move’ burdens exchequer, says J&K HC
70,000 migrants return on 67 trains
Railways say 21 more trains will take home people stranded in various places across the country
Ships on way to the Maldives, UAE
The Navy dispatched two ships, INS Jalashwa and INS Magar, to Male under Operation “Samudra Setu” to repatriate stranded Indian citizens.
The evacuation operations will start on May 8 as part of Phase 1 efforts, the Navy said on Tuesday.
Defence sources confirmed that INS Shardul and INS Airavat had set sail to the UAE. Modalities at the port of entry were being finalised and should be in place before the ships reach, a defence source said.